To: perfctr-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: perfctr-2.6.0-pre4 released Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Version 2.6.0-pre4 of perfctr, the Linux/x86 performance monitoring counters driver, is now available at the usual place: http://www.csd.uu.se/~mikpe/linux/perfctr/ There is one more driver change scheduled before 2.6.0-final: killing a process' perfctrs if sys_sched_setaffinity() or set_cpus_allowed() would migrate it to a forbidden CPU. A solution has been coded, but it cannot yet generate useful diagnostics due to unresolved synchronisation issues. Also, I've decided to remove support for all kernels older than 2.4.15 from perfctr-2.6.0, based on their technical flaws and general obsolescence. (An informal poll in perfctr-devel a few weeks ago didn't lead to any complaints.) Version 2.6.0-pre4, 2003-08-19 - Kernel/user-space API switched to a new "sparse marshalling" mechanism, which supports x86 application code on x86-64, and API struct extensions w/o breaking binary compatibility. - Prepared the library for the future non-/proc/pid/perfctr API. - Fixed a bug in the per-process perfctr creation code. The remote-control interface was racy in preemptible kernels. - Fixed a bug in the process exit code for preemptible kernels. - Changes to handle 2.6 kernels with the cpumask_t patch (-mm, -osdl): * Driver converted to use cpumask_t API, with compatibility wrapper for cpumask_t-free kernels. * API change: removed the cpus and cpus_forbidden sets from the perfctr_info struct, added new data type and commands for retrieving these sets. (cpumask_t values cannot be exported as-is since their sizes depend on kernel configuration, and the type definition uses 'long' which breaks 32/64-bit binary compatibility.) * Updated library and example programs for the API change. - Fixed a dependency bug in the library Makefile. - Added support for VIA C3 Antaur/Nehemiah processors. / Mikael Pettersson